With the worldwide interconnection of computers through the Internet, bandwidth is considered to be a critical resource. The increasing amount of network traffic driven by the net and other emerging applications is straining the capacity of network infrastructures. To keep pace, better technologies are constantly being sought to support and manage traffic growth.
The discussion which follows presupposes knowledge of network data communications, and switches and routers as used in communication networks. A fundamental understanding of bits, bytes, packets and frames in network communication is also helpful for the discussion that follows.
A switching network has switching points or nodes for transmission of data among senders and receivers connected to the network. The switching performed by these switching points is, in fact, the action of passing packets or “frames” of data received by a switching point or node to a further node in the network. This switching action is the means by which communication data is moved through a packet switching network.
Each node may comprise a packet processor configured to process the packets or frames of data. The packet processor may contain a data storage unit, such as a DRAM, configured with a plurality of buffers to store frame data. Each frame of data may be associated with a frame control block configured to describe the corresponding frame. Each frame control block may be associated with one or more buffer control blocks, wherein each buffer control block associated with a frame control block may be associated with a buffer in a data storage unit. Buffer control blocks and frame control blocks comprise various fields of information, wherein these fields are each supplied by a separate memory in the packet processor. Thus, the fields of information in the frame control blocks and the buffer control blocks may be obtained by accessing a separate memory in the packet processor.